AI Meeting Notes, Actually Compared: Granola vs Fireflies vs Otter (2026).

I'll save you the research spiral: if you have 5+ meetings a week and you're on a Mac, it's Granola. If you're on a team that lives in Salesforce, it's Fireflies. If you need to transcribe a 90-minute class, it's Otter. Everything below is the evidence.

The scoreboard

Granola: Free (25 notes total) / $14/mo Business. Mac only. Runs locally — no bot joins your call. Signature: invisible. Annoyance: the 25-note cliff. Rating: 4.5/5

Fireflies.ai: Free (800 min/seat) / $10/mo Pro / $19/mo Business. Web + bot. Bot joins your call. Signature: CRM autofill. Annoyance: hidden AI credit wall. Rating: 3.5/5

Otter.ai: Free (300 min/month) / $8.33/mo annual. Web + bot (OtterPilot). Auto-joins scheduled meetings. Signature: live notes all participants can see. Annoyance: silently halved Pro tier. Rating: 3.0/5

Granola — the one that doesn't join your meeting

There's a quiet but meaningful difference between Granola and the other two: it never shows up as a bot participant in your calendar or on your call. You download the Mac app, grant microphone access, and it runs silently in the background. Your guests never see "Granola joined the meeting." After the call ends, you hit "Generate Notes" and it structures everything — action items, decisions, key quotes — using GPT-4o and Claude under the hood.

The free tier's limit is genuinely brutal: 25 total notes, not per month. You'll hit it within two weeks of regular use. Then it's $14/month (Business tier), which is fair for what you get. Granola raised $125M at a $1.5B valuation in March 2026 — the category is large enough to support unicorn pricing.

Who it's FOR: Mac-only solopreneurs with 3–8 meetings a week who care about not having a robot in their client calls. Consultants, coaches, freelancers — anyone whose guest experience matters.

Who it's NOT for: Windows users (full stop). Anyone who needs CRM autofill as a hard requirement. Teams of 5+ where $14/seat stacks up fast.

Rating: 4.5/5. Frictionless in a way the other two aren't. What would make it 5: Windows support and a free tier that doesn't hard-cliff at 25 notes.

Fireflies.ai — the integrations play

Fireflies is the most enterprise-brained of the three. A bot joins your call, transcribes everything, and layers on conversation intelligence: talk-time ratios, topic tracking, CRM autofill for Salesforce and HubSpot. If you're building a sales process and need meeting data to flow into your CRM automatically, nothing else in this group comes close.

The pricing model is where it gets messy. $10/month Pro sounds reasonable until you hit the AI credit system. Pro gives you 20–30 AI credits per month. Advanced queries — AskFred semantic search, meeting summaries, CRM autofill — burn through those fast. Additional credits cost $5 per 50. You'll realistically spend $19–29/month if you use the features that make Fireflies worth using over a free transcription tool.

Who it's FOR: Revenue-focused solopreneurs running sales calls who need meeting notes to flow into a CRM. Marketing agencies tracking client calls. Anyone who needs multi-platform team access without Mac dependency.

Who it's NOT for: Anyone who hates having a bot in the room. Anyone who wants clean, simple notes without monitoring a credit meter.

Rating: 3.5/5. The integrations are real and they work. The credit system is designed to look affordable and then penalize you for using the product correctly. That's a deliberate choice and it earns a deliberate penalty.

Otter.ai — the original, showing its age

Otter was first to market with the auto-joining meeting bot concept and it still does what it says. OtterPilot joins your scheduled calls, takes live notes that all participants can see in real time, captures slide screenshots, and exports structured summaries. The $8.33/month annual rate makes it the cheapest of the three for light users.

Here's what I can't get past: Otter reduced the Pro tier from 6,000 transcription minutes per month to 1,200 — without a price change. If you have 5+ meetings a day, you'll burn through 1,200 minutes in two weeks. That's not a pricing update. That's removing 80% of the product you paid for.

Who it's FOR: Students and academics who need to transcribe lectures. Occasional meeting attendees who want a free tier that doesn't expire after 25 uses.

Who it's NOT for: Solopreneurs with more than 3–4 meetings a week. Anyone who noticed the Pro downgrade and didn't forget.

Rating: 3.0/5. Not bad — just outcompeted on every axis that matters to this audience, and the pricing sleight-of-hand keeps it from climbing higher.

The meta-take

Three tools, three genuinely different markets. Granola has won the UX war — it's the only one that doesn't feel like a product manager over-specced it. Fireflies has won the enterprise integration war — if CRM autofill is the job, nothing else is close. Otter is losing the middle ground, squeezed from above by Granola's experience and below by its own cost-cutting.

The real question is: what do you need meeting notes to do? If the answer is "organize my thinking after a call," it's Granola. If the answer is "feed my CRM," it's Fireflies. If the answer is "transcribe my 9am lecture," it's Otter.

The category isn't consolidating anytime soon — each tool has dug into a genuinely different problem. What's likely to shift: Granola ships Windows support and becomes the default recommendation for this audience. Otter reverses its Pro downgrade or loses the middle tier entirely. Fireflies keeps winning on integrations and hoping nobody does the math on credits.

My money is on Granola being the answer to "what meeting notes tool do you use" for the kind of person reading this in 12 months.

Disclosure: No affiliate arrangements with any of these tools at time of publication. Links are direct.

What should I review next? AI scheduling tools? Notion vs Linear vs Height? Video tools for async demos? Hit reply.